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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28929489">it's up to me now to turn on the bright lights</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazarov/pseuds/lazarov'>lazarov</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magicians (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Canon-Typical Past Suicidal Thoughts, Canonical Child Abuse, Fix-It, M/M, Mutual Pining, Possession, Resurrection, Season 5 AU, i absolutely promise you that this is a love story, if you haven't seen classic teen film Idle Hands (1999) then you're honestly just missing out</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:46:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>19,352</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28929489</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazarov/pseuds/lazarov</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>If he was being honest, Eliot would've appreciated more of an extended interlude between possessions.</p><p>
  <b>Or: Quentin saves himself—but everybody helps.</b>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>66</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. One.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Some preliminary scene-setting is in order.</p><p>1. Eliot and Margo don’t go to Fillory. Fuck that. They go home, and they mourn, but mostly everyone rallies to figure out how the hell to get Q back.</p><p>2. Instead of walking Quentin into an office building basement and sending him off through a painted plywood doorway — because the producers of this show had clearly given up on providing it with any sort of budget or aesthetic oomph in season 4 (its ““last”” “““season””” and you can’t convince me otherwise) — Penny walks Quentin to an actual, real-ass train platform, hugs him, and then Traveler-bamfs out of there instead of emotionally manipulating him into crossing over by standing there watching.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>It had been less than a week, and Eliot refused to believe he might be possessed a-fucking-gain.</p><p>It had been less than an hour, and Quentin was ready for a change of scenery.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Infinite thanks to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoko_onchi/pseuds/hoko_onchi">hoko_onchi</a> for beta-ing, and to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubick">Rubick</a> for cheering me on. My heart is full.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Quentin had been dead for six days, and Eliot’s body was drunk. </p><p>Wait, no. Start again. <em> Eliot </em> was drunk. He pinched himself hard enough to elicit a wince then announced to no one in particular, “I’m—drunk. I am. Me.”</p><p>Snatching the Nintendo controller back over his skeleton was weird. He had to keep reminding himself to stop thinking of it as a separate thing that he operated, like a forklift, instead of part of his unified metaphysical self. He usually didn’t even realize he was doing it until he said something like, “My body’s knee hurts,” and Margo looked at him like she’d been slapped.</p><p>Now, he was drinking alone in his bedroom with the door shut at the little desk that he had had various athletic sexual encounters on top of but had never actually studied at—Eliot tilted his head to the side to get a better look at the scuff on the corner where Seven Parker’s left shoe had taken a bite out of the shellac. (<em>What a stupid fucking name—</em>Eliot had fucked him like he was trying to fuck the stupid name out of him.) </p><p>Even though he was drunk enough that his ears were red and pounding like Jumanji drums, he could hear the vague outlines of Margo and Alice’s voices downstairs. They sounded like the schoolteacher from Charlie Brown; he occasionally caught what had the same general shape as Quentin’s name. Eliot waved his hand and a pillow flew from his bed to wedge itself valiantly against the crack under his bedroom door, muffling their voices. </p><p>They were all—Eliot, especially—pointedly trying to ignore how selfish this plan was to try to get Quentin back while they simultaneously dedicated every waking hour to it. It was less a cohesive plan and more of a jumbled series of attempts to throw hybrid versions of spells at the wall to find something, anything, that might stick—something that would sink its hook into Quentin and yeet him out of the Underworld without scrambling the balance of the universe, or blowing themselves up, or accidentally re-fucking with the flow of magic so that they were left somewhere worse than square one. Most of the real dirty work so far was thanks to Alice—the terrifying but promising stuff that occasionally made every light in the Cottage flicker, or made them all feel like something heart-freezing and intangible had passed through their bodies at the same time before Alice shouted from the dining room, “Fuck, sorry, ignore that!” He had utter faith in her; she was smarter than any of them except for maybe Eliot himself, but she had him beat on the <em> willing to work so hard I die at my desk of thirst and exhaustion like a salaryman </em>front so it didn’t really matter on the brains front. </p><p><em> Alice was going to figure it out. </em> Eliot kept repeating it to himself, over and over. She had to figure it out. They had already done the impossible and brought Alice back from the sort-of dead, so logic dictated that they could take it one step further and bring Quentin back from the actual, honest-to-God dead-dead. <em> Alice was going to figure it out, </em>and then, Quentin could come back and—and be with Alice, of course, because that’s how it was meant to be, but Eliot could at the very least have him back, breathing and near enough to touch in ways that seemed casual, and with his future restored. </p><p>Quentin’s future didn’t need to belong to Eliot; the most that he asked for is that he have one. </p><p>In the meantime, so that he could be actually <em> useful </em> for the rescue efforts instead of sitting on the sidelines offering sniping comments, he was directing his energy toward reintegrating his consciousness with his entire, like, being. It was slow-going. Today, he spent an hour walking in circles making <em> ka-thud, ka-thud </em> sounds with his cane on the living room rug, then tried to do self-imposed physio-calisthenics and managed four pathetic squats before he felt embarrassed and frustrated and his stab wound started to itch—he enjoyed thinking of it as his <em> stab wound, </em>it sounded very tough and romantic, like he was a Greaser in The Outsiders. (He wasn’t sure if it counted as being stabbed if the weapon was an ax; he didn’t care.) His subsequent attempt at jerking off technically went fine; his cock got hard but his heart wasn’t really in it, so he let his hard-on die and zipped his fly back up and snuck a clean-ish looking glass and a bottle of whiskey off the bar cart.</p><p>And now his—<em>he </em> was drunk.</p><p>Eliot’s eyes drooped. He must have blacked out for a millisecond, because his left hand suddenly wiggled and twitched and loosened around his glass. He didn’t have the reflexes to—<em>ah, Goddamnit </em>—telekinetically nudge it back into his grasp and so it fell, clunking against the edge of the table hard enough to leave another battle-wound in the teak before bouncing onto his belly. Three fingers of neat, very nice Japanese whiskey poured down his front, pooling in his waistcoat and seeping into the bandages half-assedly wrapped around the wound in his side. The alcohol burned as it waterboarded his stitches.</p><p>“Fucking—fuck,” he spat, and then, “no, wait, I can—I know spells,” as if reminding himself. He poised his hands for Popper 3—the first step of a dead-easy drying spell taught for cleaning Physical Applications workstations. “You can do this.” </p><p>His fingers twitched disobediently in response.</p><p>Spells were a bitch since he got his body back. He still felt like an eight-month old forcibly developing the part of his brain responsible for fine motor skills and it was hard to will his fingers to do detailed things; he wasn’t even that confident in his Cheerio-picking-up skills, to be honest, which he thought was an appropriate match for his lack of sharing skills and his underdeveloped sense of interpersonal empathy. He’d mostly mastered putting on his pants and brushing his hair, though, so there was that. Margo still had to help with his cuff links. </p><p>His left hand was particularly reticent to be a team player in his recovery. “Come on, you belligerent little fucker,” he hissed, shaking it out. He could feel it and see it, and it flexed when he thought about flexing it, but he was pretty sure that his consciousness hadn’t quite made it that far yet—like, it had only just started to take root in his brain and hadn’t yet shot its tendrils all the way out to his fingers and toes. He regretfully considered how fun it might’ve been to jerk off if he wasn’t so terminally depressed.</p><p>“Jesus, El. Smells like James Joyce threw up in here.” Margo was in the doorway with her arms crossed, wearing leggings and a wrinkled sweater with her hair pulled up into a loose bun, and somehow it was seeing <em> that </em>—not the slightly-infected gash in his side, or the knowledge that Quentin was dead that pulsed in his brain like one of those flashing hostile architecture lights meant to keep people awake and uncomfortable and instill a deep-seated sense of unwelcome—that reminded him that shit was bad. She kicked at the door-pillow and made a simultaneously pitying and pissed off expression at him. He weighed the potential of waving his hand to slam the door in her face, which he might’ve done if she was literally anyone else, but instead, he slumped forward and planted his elbows on the table to steady himself, scrubbing at his face with his hands.</p><p>“You spying on me now, Fairy Eye?”</p><p>He wanted her to get mad at him for being drunk when he wasn’t supposed to be drunk or call him a fuckhead like he deserved, but she refused to give him the toxic attention he craved. She just sighed. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”</p><p>He let her guide him to his bathroom and sit him on the toilet lid and undress him from the waist up, her small hands delicately undoing the cufflinks and shirt buttons that she’d fastened for him that morning. “I feel like someone stole my body for a joyride and abandoned it on the side of a highway, and County Police brought it back with—” He hiccoughed, lifting one arm to let her slide it from his shirtsleeve. “With the front bumper missing. And cum stains in the upholstery.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. It made a pleasing sore feeling and little stars burst behind his eyelids. “I think it’s a write-off.”</p><p>“It’s not a write-off.” Margo tossed his shirt into the corner, then patted him on the head and pulled him forward to lean his forehead against her stomach. She smelled like gardenia body lotion and burnt herbs from whatever last failed resurrection attempt went on downstairs. The soft fabric of her sweater was nice on his skin; it felt simultaneously normalizing and discombobulating lately to see her in Earth clothes on the regular. </p><p>“I want to kill everything, Bambi,” he said, surprising himself with the lucidity with which it came out of him. He looked at his palms in his lap and spread them out wide, until he felt his skin burn from the stretch. “I want to wrap my hands around the entire world and crush it like a pop can.”</p><p>“I know. Me too.” He looked up at her in time to catch her screwing her mouth up and wrinkling her nose. It could’ve passed for a swallowed-down sneeze, but he knew that face. It was her pretending-not-to-cry face. He gave her the courtesy of pretending not to notice.</p><p>Placing his hands on her hips, massaging his thumbs into the soft spot in front of her hipbones, he looked her in the eyes and said very, very seriously: “I want to be helpful.”</p><p>“You will be, once you’re back to one hundred. We’ve got it covered ‘til then. Alice is working on—well, I actually don’t really know what the fuck she’s working on ‘cause she’s like a magic savant. I’m just trying to stay out of her way and ask how high when she says jump.” She soaked and wrung out a hand towel, then moved to wipe at his sticky-damp chest but—her hands paused in mid-air. Thinking better of it, she handed it to him instead—his patience for letting even Margo take care of him in his convalescence had its limits. “For you, my liege.”</p><p>“Thanks.”</p><p>She leaned against the sink and looked out the window, squinting at the sun setting over the swaying tops of the trees. “Alice is going to try something tonight—some kind of séance Norwegian sea witch magic thing that uses the moon cycle to re-align particles in salt water to communicate with the—with people who aren’t here anymore. The Circumstances are on our side for this one, so. We’ll see.”</p><p>“Sea witch magic,” Eliot intoned. </p><p>“Hippie dippie shit,” Margo agreed.</p><p>“I bet she was a mermaid girl growing up.”</p><p>“No chance. Unicorn girl all the way—like, a horse girl but kicked up to eleven. I’d bet my right tit on it.”</p><p>That—actually made a lot of sense. Eliot allowed himself to smirk a little at the thought, even though he was still committed to being mildly pissed off that Margo had intruded on his pity-party-cum-idle-self-destruction. “What were you?”</p><p>“Vampire girl.”</p><p>Eliot snorted. “Classic.”</p><p>“What can I say? The one-two punch of Kiefer Sutherland and James Marsters jump-started my prepubescent loins and fucked me up for life.”</p><p>“Gross.” He paused, considering it. “But same.”</p><p>His grip felt weak around the hand towel, the way your hands go a little bit numb and uncoordinated when you laugh too hard or drink too much—which, okay, the latter was sort of at play here, but not entirely. The numbness made him want to slam his fingers in a drawer, hold them over a candle flame—he wanted to show them he wasn’t fucking around, <em> he was in charge here</em>. Instead, he flexed and unflexed them and cracked his knuckles and hoped that Margo didn’t notice his discomfort—</p><p>“Is this stupid?” he asked suddenly.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Trying to get him back? People lose people every day—and they don’t get to use magic to—<em>maybe this is going against the natural order of things.”</em></p><p>She held her breath; let it out. Cleared her throat. “Maybe.”</p><p>He would settle for maybe. </p><p>“Do you think he thinks about us?” Eliot murmured, wiping at his stomach hair and investigating the pulled-up edges of the tape securing his bandage, which was <em> actually </em>a write-off. He peeled the tape off slowly; distantly, he was aware that this was painful. “Do you think he can still think? Probably, right? And he’s just—in. That place, sentient, living a whole different afterlife like he’s starting at a new school?”</p><p>She didn’t answer, and something horrible and slimy awakened in his brain that he’d shoved off to the side of his consciousness and avoided looking directly at until now: </p><p>“Maybe he likes it there.” His mouth was dry. He wanted more whiskey to soak his tongue and his brain in before he finished this thought. “What if we’re going to Buffy Summers him and he’s somewhere where he’s <em> really actually fucking happy? </em> Remember when Alice came back, and—and Q had to babysit her so she didn’t burn a fucking hole in her arm when he wasn’t looking? Is that the life we’re bringing him back for?”</p><p>He ripped the last of the tape off, leaving an angry red spot on his belly, then balled the soiled bandage into a thick wad. He tried to Kobe it into the trash but missed. The wound was ugly, a crooked, puckered mouth grinning up at him, like his possession was personified into a mocking parasitic twin sliced into his skin. Margo returned the favour and pretended not to notice him glowering and poking at it as he cleaned around it and she prepared a neat stack of gauze, alcohol wipes, Polysporin, and medical tape on the edge of the sink. He performatively set to work disinfecting and re-antibacterial-goop-ing and rebandaging even though (or maybe because) if Margo wasn’t keeping an eye on him, he wouldn’t have bothered. </p><p>“Alice knows the reality of—the <em> potential </em>of that better than anybody. And if she didn’t think bringing him back was the right thing to do, she wouldn’t be busting her ass doing it.” Margo sniffed and wiped discreetly at one eye with her knuckle, still staring out the window to avoid his pleading gaze. “I think maybe we stop with the solo drinky-drinky thing for a little while, El.”</p><p>“But the drinky-drinky,” he said very seriously, straightening his spine and puffing his chest out like Atticus Finch delivering a closing argument, “makes the Phantom Body Syndrome be—less.” Not quite the same heft as the words had in his mind but it got his point across. He started to laugh, doubling over in a way that made the wound in his side feel like he was being torn in half. “Do you think they’ve given him a job like Penny? He died—God, he fucking died Margo—to save us, me, and I never even got to—” he gulped in air and it went straight to his stomach and he gripped the counter, pretty sure that he was about to throw up. He could sense that he was doing that thing that made everyone else in the Cottage want to avoid him as much as he wanted to avoid them, but he couldn’t stop his mouth and his brain from spewing like he had emotional food poisoning, “Maybe it’s not good—maybe he hates it and it’s terrible and the Underworld has him working as, like, a ticket-tearer at the Museum of Earthly Oddities or pumping gas—” a jagged breath and then, oh no, his laughter was turning to tears again and there was nothing he could do to chase them back. “Maybe I could go get him. Or find him, at least, and ask him what he wants—I could—you could keep me on ice, and I could go find him—”</p><p>“Hey. We’re not talking like that, Romeo.” </p><p>“I’d be so quick—”</p><p>“Stop.”</p><p>“—back before you could say Jack Robinson—” </p><p>“Eliot, stop.” His face crumpled and her hands found his shoulders and squeezed. Her grip felt grounding, and like <em> home</em>, and he wanted to shove her the fuck away from him. “We’re going to figure out a way to get him back, but you’re staying topside. That is not an option.” She tilted his head back with a gentle-firm hand on his jaw and held his gaze even as he tried to avoid hers. “Got it?”</p><p>“Totally.” He was pretty sure it sounded convincing.</p><p>“Jesus,” she murmured. “It’s like you’re not even trying to make me fuckin’ feel better.”</p><p>He shrugged and wiggled out of her grasp so that he could finish bandaging himself up; she squashed all the discarded wrappers and wipes into a pile and then tossed them out. </p><p>With Eliot mostly wiped clean and no longer smelling like his alcoholic Uncle Jeffrey, an awkward beat passed—neither of them were sure how to move forward from the vulnerable shittiness of the moment. Margo, <em> bless, </em> finally broke the silence. “Josh is making carbonara. He insists we carb load if we’re gonna keep burning the midnight oil.” She poked him in the sternum. “Especially you. You look like you just spent an extended retreat at Brakebills South. Come on down out of your lair and eat with us, Nosferatu.”</p><p>Eliot looked down, at the way the band of his trousers gaped a little at the waist and his wrists were more angular than he remembered them being. He’d lost a good ten pounds while the Monster was in him—which was frankly surprising because by all accounts the thing had spent most of its time pouring booze down his throat and shoveling pizza and ice cream into his mouth. “It’s possession <em> chic. </em> We’re doing family meals now?” </p><p>“An army marches on its stomach, so we’re keeping the troops fat and happy. That includes you.” Margo was a project manager at heart; she must have been a bossy little nightmare on the playground growing up. God, she made him so fucking crazy that he wanted to throttle her most days, but he loved her more than anything. Secretly, he often wondered why she was slumming it with him and not running a Fortune 500 company with an iron fist, or blackmailing oligarchs from the sun deck of her megayacht. “It’ll be worse if you keep hiding up here—”</p><p>“—I’m not <em> hiding up here </em>—” Eliot slammed his head back against the wall in frustration, just a little too hard. Pain pinged around in his head like a dropped penny.</p><p>“—we’re all mourning, El.”</p><p>“I know—it’s—” He wanted to spit that his mourning was a very different one than Margo’s, or Kady’s, or Josh’s. Maybe not Julia’s. And probably not Alice’s. In truth, her mourning made his feel shameful, like he was trying to blow the candles out on her birthday—it felt wrong to hurt in front of her. But he also knew, first, that he didn’t want to have that conversation with Margo now, or maybe ever—and also that maybe from the way she was looking at him, she already knew. Instead he just waved his hand and muttered, “I can’t stand the air down there—too thick, can’t breathe.”</p><p>She considered him for a moment. “Okay.” She said it in that, <em> I’ll let you think you’ve won this battle but I’m going to play dirty to win the war </em>sort of way—that was how negotiations always went with her; Eliot never went toe to toe with her expecting to win out in the end. “I’ll leave a bowl outside your door, but tomorrow, you come down to eat with the rest of the Bad News Bears or I’m starving you out.” </p><p>She held up her pinky finger, and Eliot flicked his head back to get the hair off his forehead, rolling his eyes for good measure before locking his gaze with hers.</p><p>“Deal.”</p><p>Margo nodded; she gestured toward the door. “Good. Okay. I’m on salad duty, so I’d better get down there and start chopping romaine before Josh calls in an Amber Alert. Do you need help—?”</p><p>She glanced at his cane, leaned up against the side of the toilet, and then at him, sitting on the toilet lid and looking distinctly pathetic—or at least he assumed that he looked as pathetic as he felt—and Eliot waved an alcohol-clumsy dismissive hand, like a king on this throne releasing his vassal, “I’m fine. Just want to be in the money spot if I puke.”</p><p>“Do you need—”</p><p>“<em>Go</em>.”</p><p>“Okay.” She blew out a breath, still wavering near the door. “I love you, you know.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“Good. Don’t do anything stupid.”</p><p>And then she finally did leave him and Eliot thought, <em> Define stupid. </em>He stayed on the toilet seat lid, listening to her footsteps pause outside his closed bedroom door as she listened for movement before descending the stairs. As soon as she was gone, he missed her—he wanted her hands back on his shoulders, her scent in his nose. He felt sweaty and chest-achy, and he could smell his own hot-sour skin radiating up from his armpits, and he resigned himself to passing out on the ceramic-tiled floor until the morning came—he didn’t care about Alice’s Norwegian sea bitch magic, none of those touchy-feely communication spells ever worked; Eliot had tried plenty—until it occurred to him that if he put in the effort to wobble to his feet, he could retake his place kneeling at the shrine of the whiskey Gods. </p><p>His left hand vibrated as he reached for his cane, and he viciously shook it out again before snatching up the carved handle and slamming the leather tip against the floor, <em> ka-thud ka-thud-</em>ing furiously back out of the bathroom.</p><p>“You predictable little bitch,” he murmured, mostly fondly. It didn’t end up being worth the stabbing pain of bending over and standing up. Margo had snatched the whiskey on her way out, gone without a trace except for a ring of spilt booze eating through the desk’s varnish. <em> It’s okay</em>, he had—</p><p>“Pills.” Eliot rapped the knuckles of his right hand against his head with a thunk that rattled his brains and made him feel semi-conscious again. He moved toward the side of his bed on instinct, like a fox seeing movement out of the corner of its eye and darting after a rabbit before it was even aware that its limbs were moving—it wasn’t that he thought it was a good idea to take a tiny fistful of definitely-not-prescription opiates (or something? he couldn’t exactly remember) sitting in a bottle buried at the back of his bedside table, or even that he thought that he needed them. Thought didn’t enter into the equation at all. His grief was so heavy in his chest that he felt like he might go crashing through the floorboards; his body was unpredictable and churlish under his instruction, like an untamed colt. Putting something neuron-restraining into his body seemed like the most natural order of things—it was like an easy SAT question. Just as <em> hungry </em> meant <em> eat</em>, and <em> tired </em> meant <em> sleep</em>, brain too much meant <em> find something to smoke or snort or otherwise efficiently introduce into his bloodstream</em>. A straight and obvious line, A pointing to B in big neon lights.</p><p>He reached for the drawer pull, and</p><p>his left hand froze, as if someone had smacked him with a well-cast version of Milton’s Inhibition. He tried to move it, focusing every fucking <em> ounce </em> of concentration he had left in his drunk, stupid brain, but it just <em> wouldn’t</em>, his hand levitating in mid-air like a butterfly pinned to an invisible display, fingers slowly spreading wide under some control that wasn’t his own. </p><p>“What the <em> fu </em>—”</p><p>Eliot’s hand started to move, dragging his arm and his whole body ragdolling behind it, like he was Sheriff Woody and his floppy limbs didn’t have any bones to keep them in line. His hand reached for the bed, dragging itself across the linen comforter, then shot toward the desk to rap its knuckles against the wood, hard enough to shoot a few quick jolts of pain up Eliot’s arm, and then—</p><p>“No, fuck no, <em> no</em>—”</p><p>—attached itself to Eliot’s face like an octopus, feeling its way across the bridge of his nose, fingering at his hairline, fishhooking at the corner of his mouth, poking at his nostrils—</p><p>“—<em>fucking stop!”  </em></p><p>It did. Obediently, Eliot’s hand slipped from his face and fell by his side, clenching and unclenching impatiently. Like it was considering its options. Panting, Eliot held up his right arm defensively, readying himself to fend off another facehugger attack, but none came. After ten deep breaths, counted out loud, he was pretty sure that he could flex and unflex the fingers of his left hand without it trying to suffocate him or go full Thing from the Addams Family again. </p><p>Two realizations hit him, so quickly it was hard to tell if they were concurrent or consecutive. The first was that he was pretty sure he was losing his mind. The second was that, if he <em> wasn’t </em> going crazy, the Monster was still lingering in his body like a latent infection, like he hadn’t taken his full course of antibiotics and had earned himself a superbug. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>As Quentin waited for the train, he poked at the unfamiliar sense of calm in his stomach like it was a blubbery deep-sea creature, washed up on a beach post-tsunami.</p><p><em> This is it, </em> he thought. <em> The River Styx is a too-bright, artificially clean subway station. </em> He was initially dismayed that the Underworld didn’t have a better sense for the dramatic or whimsical, then reasoned that it was probably just a mirage meant to soothe his New York brain with an approximation of the familiar. Maybe dead Floridians waited in knee-high brackish water for a swamp boat. Or a talking manatee.</p><p>Placebo or not, it was working. He felt weirdly placid, enough to think rationally about the situation like he was a TV announcer in the stands and not a player scrimmaging on the field. He really actually didn’t want to be dead at all, he realized, glancing at the MetroCard. The card was the part giving him the most trouble. Or rather, the fact that he was just handed it and shooed toward the platform like it was lunch money and he was late for school, instead of being bodily shoved onto the train by some yoked Underworld bouncer. </p><p>It had to mean something. There had to be some kind of cosmic choice at play here, right?</p><p>“You Mike?”</p><p>Quentin’s head snapped toward the voice. “What?”</p><p>A man was standing five feet away. Quentin hadn’t heard him approach.</p><p>“It’s Mike, right?” The man squinted at a clipboard. He was bald, but his colouring gave him away as someone who used to be a redhead. He was about fifty with the platonic ideal of a New York dad accent, wearing plumber’s coveralls. An embroidered name tag announced his name as Joe in friendly red lettering. Quentin wondered if this was all part of the placebo mirage. “Mike Simpson, twenty-nine, from Queens? You go through intake yet?” </p><p>While he was alive, Quentin had spent a lot of time thinking about being dead. He’d failed to consider what he would do if he was given a last-minute, Life Round 2: Electric Boogaloo, Hail Mary choice. It felt like an exam he forgot to study for.</p><p>“Yes,” said Quentin suddenly—he wasn’t sure why. He tucked the MetroCard deep into his back pocket.</p><p>“Good. You’re late. We gotta go.” Joe turned and started to walk in the opposite direction, before spinning around again. “Oh—and sorry that you don’t get to see the stupid fucking pig thing, I know they like to hype it up.” He seemed genuinely apologetic. “Anyway, c’mon Mike-Simpson-twenty-nine-from-Queens.” </p><p>Quentin bounced on his heels, glancing around for witnesses. The idea of following felt like stepping off a cliff without double-checking that his ankles were strapped into the bungee cord, but Quentin un-stuck his feet and did it anyway, trailing behind him, careful to remain clear of the yellow line.</p><p>“Who did your intake?”</p><p>Quentin considered lying, but guessing at a name was probably a worse plan than just telling the truth and hoping for the best. “Penny.”</p><p>“Penny! Great guy.” Registering the look on his face, Joe added: “I get it—he’s got kind of a tight butthole when you first meet him, but he’s a good apple. We do beers on the weekends.”</p><p>Weekends and beer still existed in the Underworld? And Penny had watercooler buddies? Quentin wasn’t sure which one was more difficult to take in. They walked the length of the platform, past the DO NOT ENTER sign and into the floodlight-illuminated service tunnel that ran along the—actually, now that he was really looking, there were no tracks between the platform and the far wall. In their place, there were massive hoof-prints worn into the concrete. He decided he would rather not know what stupid fucking pig-thing Joe was talking about.</p><p>“Pardon the not-so-fancy shortcut,” Joe said over his shoulder. “I always feel like I’m taking a little kid behind the fence at Disneyland.” He paused. “That came out weird. Anyway, P-Man already gave you the spiel back there so I’ll keep it short: right now, your soul is an unripe banana—unfit for consumption.” Joe glanced at Quentin’s stricken face and snorted a laugh. “It’s a metaphor. You’re not getting eaten down there.”</p><p>“Down where?” He stopped. “Hell?”</p><p>“What? Jesus Christ, no! I don’t know why they make me pick up the newbies—I’m always putting my fuckin’ foot in it.” Joe slid a card through a sensor next to a heavy-looking door, then shouldered through it and held it open so Quentin could follow. On the other side of the door was a humid steam tunnel—why would the Underworld need a steam tunnel? Quentin resolved to stop asking so many questions he would never know the answer to so as not to disturb the tenuous grasp he was still somehow maintaining on his sense of calm—which they followed until it branched off into another, weirdly cold, tunnel. </p><p>That one was dotted with the occasional scuffed-up steel door, only one of which was open; through it, six or seven men in various flavors of blue collar dad, all wearing jumpsuits identical to Joe’s and sitting around a card table, waved at them as they passed by. Quentin tentatively waved back, and one of them shot him an encouraging but otherwise extremely confusing thumbs up.</p><p>He found his voice. “Where are we going?”</p><p>“Right, okay, basically—after a gajillion years of running the Underworld, the Powers That Be decided that it’s counterproductive to try to get souls to move on if those souls think they’ve still got some livin’ to do.” His phrasing was not lost on Quentin, who nodded dumbly. “So, since you’re a green banana, you’re getting sent to the McDonald’s PlayPlace of the Underworld where you can do all the jerking-off-while-spying-on-your-naked-ex-girlfriends you want until you get bored and decide that the F Train to infinity is the better deal—which believe me, <em> you will.” </em> He had the practiced, disinterested inflection of someone who rattled off this introduction ten times a day. Consulting his chart again, he glanced at Quentin and added belatedly, “Or ex-boyfriends.”</p><p><em> Nobody told me this was an option</em><em>,</em> thought Quentin. Panic finally seeped into his belly, and he mentally greeted it the way you do when you run into an old grade-school bully, grown up and in line at the DMV: he wasn’t necessarily glad to see it, but it was weirdly comforting to simply be joined by something familiar. “But—why?”</p><p>“Finally, he asks the magic question.” Joe chuckled, not unkindly. Not especially kindly, either. “Dunno, kid. The Pee-Tee-Bee think there’s some benefit to letting you choose for yourselves—maybe it’s something to do with the universe’s karmic balance, or the divine sanctity of human souls. Or maybe it was just bad for employee morale when we used to have to knee you people in the groin and shove you into the pig like it was rush hour in Tokyo.”</p><p>When Quentin didn’t laugh, Joe shot him a look, like, <em> come on kid, lighten up. </em> Quentin had been on the receiving end of that look many times in his life. It felt appropriate to get smacked with it in the afterlife, too. At the end of the cold tunnel was another keycard door with a little handwritten sign next to it: <em> Please make sure this door closes behind you. Thank you! Mgmt. </em> A smiley-face was scribbled next to the signature. That door, to Quentin’s great dismay, led to a poured concrete service stairwell. </p><p>To his even greater dismay, they headed downward, descending flight after flight in silence except for the thundering sound of their combined footfalls which echoed into a hollow clattering through the stairwell, passing by an equal number of unmarked steel doors set into the wall on every landing. Pausing to stick his head over the handrail, Quentin hazarded a glance upward: the staircase appeared to rise forever into an infinity-pinpoint with no visible ceiling. He didn’t quite have the guts to look down.</p><p>The break in Joe’s exposition gave Quentin enough time to really think about what he was doing—what he had just <em> done</em>. He pictured the real Mike standing on the train platform, toeing the yellow line with the tips of his sneakers, confused and waiting for a nice older man in a plumber’s suit to come pick him up and escort him wherever he’d been promised. He imagined a giant pig with Broadway advertisements pasted to its sides slamming on the brakes to pick up an unwilling passenger, regarding him with one lolling, black eyeball. What if Mike felt trapped and boarded the pig when it wasn’t his time? And if that was the case, what happened to green banana souls in the Underworld, anyway? Could they pass on, or was that why limbo existed—if it existed at all? Or maybe Mike didn’t want to get on the pig, but someone came to Tokyo-rush-hour him onto it anyway while he screamed that <em> somebody had made a terrible mistake. </em> Did Quentin sacrifice a perfect stranger to a permanent afterlife of dissatisfaction and incompleteness because of his own weakness after he’d chosen (or at least he thought he’d chosen) to die for a greater purpose (maybe), but was now resiling from that brief moment of bravery by choosing to follow Joe without the faintest clue where this moment of potential opportunity might lead?</p><p>It was strange that no sirens were sounding yet. How had the Underworld not figured out his very simple, very stupid lie by now? Why didn’t Joe’s clipboard at least have a dead guy mugshot on it, for quality control purposes? How were there not better security measures for the Underworld’s soul processing plant? Maybe this was all a long-con. Maybe there was no Mike and this was actually the final ethical litmus test issued by the Powers That Be to confirm that Quentin deserved hell all along and that he really was the piece of shit person he’s always been pretty sure that—</p><p>Joe stopped on the next landing so suddenly that Quentin nearly barreled into the back of him; he had to scramble to clutch at the handrail to halt his momentum. </p><p>“Alright,” Joe announced, yanking a nondescript door open and ushering Quentin inside. “We’re here.”</p><p>On the other side of the door was yet another long fucking hallway, which Quentin felt was somewhat anticlimactic after all the fire and brimstone and flying people-eating monsters he’d geared himself up for as a consequence of lying to a psychopomp in a plumber’s onesie and stealing another soul’s destiny. At least it was carpeted and nicely lit and lined with a few dozen numbered doors like a hotel, which was a nice change in pace from the steampunk industrial vibe up until now.</p><p>“Welcome to what we—very lovingly—call the haunting floor. You’re in sixty-seven.” Joe led him down the hall and swiped his keycard again, then swung the door open with a curiously proud flourish, like he was the general manager of the Plaza. </p><p>Despite the lull-you-into-a-sense-of-familiarity state of the hallway, the interior of the room was decidedly not built for hospitality. It was a windowless white square, empty except for a white reclining chair-thing in the middle—as if a dentist’s chair screwed an Eames chair and made sociopathic babies. Despite the complete lack of visible light fixtures, the room glowed with a low, pale radiating light, emanating from nowhere and everywhere at once. The longer Quentin stared at it, the more convinced he became that the light was <em> pulsating</em>, womb-like and alive. <em> Oh, fuck no. No thanks. Nope. </em> Quentin impulsively shuffled backward a step. There had to be other, better ways to drag his feet and buy time to try to figure out how to become Not Dead than stepping into this macabre-ass Clockwork Orange re-education room.</p><p>“I keep trying to talk them out of the creepy fuckin’ Soviet ultra-minimalist look. Look—the room’s empty because it’s not about the room, it’s about the energy fields running through it.” Joe wiggled his fingers through the air for emphasis. “All you gotta do is sit in the chair, close your eyes, think of England—or, your mom’s house, or like, your hottest high school teacher’s bathroom, and then—well, you’ll figure it out quick. We used to include an instructional pamphlet but the whole system’s like handing an iPad to a three year old. It’s so intuitive it made Steve Jobs cry.”</p><p>Quentin poked his head through the doorway to get a better look at the room. He was careful that none of the rest of his body passed through the threshold, as though keeping his arms and legs from crossing that invisible barrier might keep him safe—a kind of pathetic personal security theatre. The room really was <em> empty</em>-empty. There wasn’t even a courtesy table with snacks and magazines and kleenex, or a bathroom door, or somewhere where he could feasibly crouch in the darkness for a few hours to rock himself into something resembling calm before he attempted whatever he was supposed to do in that Goddamn alien probe chair.</p><p>“What if I have to piss?” he finally asked, uselessly, his head still protruding awkwardly into the room, with his body at a ninety-degree angle that made his back ache. Just like the puke-on-his-shoes panic in his belly, the needling twinge that stabbed in the little spot between his spine and his left shoulderblade; it was so familiar and human and unexpected that the air was forced out of his lungs like he’d been Sparta-kicked in the chest.</p><p>“You won’t have to. If you really <em> want </em>to—like, if that’s the thing tethering your soul to the Underworld, then go ahead and think about pissing and you can relive all your Pissing Greatest Hits. The world is your piss oyster.”</p><p>Quentin wished Joe would stop saying piss. It was making him feel insane. “So this is how… this is—<em>I’m going to be a ghost? ” </em></p><p>“The haunting floor isn’t just a catchy name.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Yes, you get to be a ghost. Essentially.”</p><p>“What the fuck,” said Quentin. He tried to wrap his head around what that even <em> meant, </em>but trying to conceptualize it felt too massive and exhausting, like trying to imagine a colour he’d never seen based on the enthusiastic and well-meaning description of an alien, and his mind kept wandering toward the thought of translucent men in civil war regalia, dragging chains down staircases at night in old Massachusetts houses. “I’m just supposed to float around in the future?” </p><p>“You can only zip around your own lifetime or observe the present. We had to put some caps on it, ‘cause letting people get into the real Timey Wimey stuff meant that they never actually left. It started to feel like this place was a restaurant full of grannies drinking tea—we couldn’t flip a table for shit.” He glanced at Quentin’s blank face. “Trust me, it’s a good metaphor.”</p><p>Since he was already hunched at a ninety-degree angle, Quentin was in a convenient position to plant his hands on his knees and begin to hyperventilate. “I don’t get it. Why don’t the Powers That Be just, like, wipe my memory and send me on my way?” Then—“I think I’m freaking out.”</p><p>Joe raised his eyebrows at him. “Would you prefer that?” From his tone, it could be arranged.</p><p>“No,” Quentin said quickly. “Uh, thanks.”</p><p>“Just try it. If you really start to wig out, I’ll come get you.” Joe held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”</p><p>Quentin nodded, dry-mouthed. He wiped his hands on his pants and hazarded another glance into the room. <em> Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck. </em>“Alright,” he said, and then—more to himself than to Joe—“I can do this.”</p><p>“That’s the spirit. Pun intended.” They stood in silence for a full thirty seconds—or at least Joe stood while Quentin stayed bent over, panting like a racehorse, willing up the nerve to do anything other than stay crouched in this position forever. He no longer felt like a TV announcer, or even a player on the field—he was the football. Joe cleared his throat. “Hey Mike?”</p><p>Belatedly, Quentin realized that was him. “Yeah?”</p><p>“You gotta, uh—actually go into the room. So I can—” he waved his hand at the door with an apologetic quirk of his mouth.</p><p>“Lock me in?”</p><p>“You got it.”</p><p>“Fuck.” Quentin nodded again. “Okay. <em> Okay</em>.” </p><p>He made a conscious effort to straighten his spine, feeling the ache shooting up through his vertebrae and marveling again at how <em> alive </em> it felt; it made no sense—the fact that his spine still felt like he’d spent the last decade with his body hunched over a library desk (which he had), or that the hot chocolate that Penny gave him tasted hot and sweet and milky. Anxiety was pumping through him, but he didn’t feel hungry or thirsty. It was like the Underworld had thrown darts at a human physiology mind map and sorted dead people’s bodily functions into <em> working </em> and <em> vestigial </em> at random. <em> It made no sense</em>. Realizing that Joe was still staring good-naturedly at him—although he was beginning to bounce on his heels, as if he was very late to something terribly important—it took all of his strength of will to make one leg lift, then step forward, and then the other one, and another step, a real-life game of QWOP as he steered himself into the room. Mentally, leaving the relative safety of the hallway and crossing the threshold was like trying to convince a Husky to jump into a bathtub. Quentin was both the human and the dog.</p><p>“You’re doing it. You got this!” Joe cheered from the doorway, only half-patronizingly.</p><p>Quentin made it over to the chair and reached out to place one hand on the headrest, cautiously, as if touching a fence that he wasn’t totally confident was unelectrified. The chair was warm under his touch and emanating its own pulsing energy, just like the walls; the feeling of it under his palm drew him in, intoxicating with something that felt a little like placing his hand on the edge of the fountains in the Neitherlands—just like the fountains, he guessed that it was made from magic so old that it was practically feral. </p><p>“Alright. Well. I’m in. Thanks?” he said, for want of knowing what the fuck else to say. He pulled his hand away from the chair—the magic stuck to him, tingling like carbonation under the pads of his fingertips.</p><p>“You’re gonna be fine. Want me to leave the light on in the hallway? Sorry, that’s just a little haunting floor joke—I actually really do have to lock you in. Underworld Policy. Anyway.” Joe offered a little wave. “Good luck, Mike Simpson, twenty-nine—”</p><p>“—from Queens,” Quentin finished for him, shaking his hand off and hazarding a checking-the-tires kick at the base of the chair with the toe of his shoe—it was <em> very </em> solid.</p><p>“Right. One last thing?” Joe called from the doorway.</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p>“The afterlife is pretty good, kid. Think hard about what missing out really means. See ya, Casper.” </p><p>The door clicked shut, and Quentin was alone.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p><b>INTERLUDE: </b> <b> <em>Baby’s Arms</em> </b> <b> — Kurt Vile</b></p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I will never, ever, ever be alone </em>
</p><p>
  <em> ‘Cause it’s all in my baby’s hands </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Shiny, shiny secret stones </em>
</p><p>
  <em> In my baby’s hands </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I get sick of just about everyone </em>
</p><p>
  <em> And I hide in my baby’s arms </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Shrink myself just like Tom Thumb </em>
</p><p>
  <em> And I hide in my baby’s hands</em>
</p><p> </p><p>[<a href="https://youtu.be/fRctZQ7vjfU">X</a>]</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Two.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A chapter about befores and afters, fathers and sons, bodies, grief and hope.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you so much to Rubi for beta-ing and being the best ass-kicker slash cheerleader around.</p><p>This fic is still going to be ridiculous and fun but—this chapter is heavy! Death has a way of dredging shit up to the surface. </p><p>If relevant to you, please see this chapter’s end note for content warnings involving child abuse, homophobia, violence involving animals, and ideation.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <hr/><p> </p><p>Eliot woke with a jerk and a groan to Margo’s rapid-fire knocking on his door and criminally loud announcement that she was going out, but to call her if he needed “anything, and you know I mean anything, dummy.”</p><p>She was taking her Queen tone with him and Eliot didn’t particularly appreciate it this early in the day—or rather, since he had no fucking clue what time it was, this just-fucking-woke-up in the day. </p><p>His cheek was glued to the pillow by a long-dried puddle of his own sour-smelling drool and his fingers were numb from the necktie he’d triple-wrapped around his left wrist before knotting it to the headboard. But, mercifully, he was still in his own bed—and judging by a quick glance around his room, it didn’t look like he’d caused any out-of-the-ordinary chaos in his sleep.</p><p>“I’m good,” he called back.</p><p>“You sure? I can hang around a few more minutes if you need help getting up and at ‘em.” </p><p>Eliot tried to breathe through his nose. His mouth tasted like a cruciferous-stuffed vegetable crisper after the fridge had been left unplugged for a few days in the middle of a dry Indiana summer. </p><p>Belatedly, and fighting the hangover throbbing in his temples, he added, “Uh huh. Thanks, though.”</p><p>“Don’t forget to change your bandages.” </p><p>“I won’t.”</p><p>“Unless you want a good old-fashioned ass-kicking.”</p><p>“I promise.”</p><p>“Good. Love you.” </p><p>Her heels pounded down the stairs. Once the coast was clear, Eliot rolled out of bed indelicately, like a seal on land, feeling not exactly emotionally prepared to be conscious. </p><p>For a while, he puttered around his room in his dressing gown—picking things up with numb-clumsy fingers, staring at them blankly and wondering why he owned things at all, then putting them down again. It was a convenient way to avoid going downstairs and running into Alice, and the broken-furious expression on her face that she didn’t bother to try to smooth out, not for any of them, an act of social defiance that Eliot deeply respected but had a hard time being in the presence of. Last night’s sea witch magic was a bust, and over the last few days she seemed to either be closing in on something else that might actually work, or just getting more reckless. The glass-rattling explosions that occasionally shook the Cottage were getting more frequent and aggressive, and her hair was getting so greasy that it looked like she’d gone for a swim in the Hudson.</p><p>Not that Eliot was in a position to judge. He caught another whiff of his own breath and made a beeline for the bathroom. If he wanted to keep hiding up here, brushing his fuzzy teeth and taking a fucking shower would take long enough to get two birds stoned at once. Plus, maybe part of reintegrating with his body required actually taking care of it. Even if it didn’t feel like <em> his</em>, again, yet—or at least, not in a way that made him feel even passively invested in his own wellbeing—he could at least treat his body like an expensive houseplant whose survival he’d been entrusted with by someone he cared about.</p><p>The soap and hot water felt like a charm, or maybe a benediction, even when it ran into his wound and made it sing a note of pain so high pitched and needling that it took his breath away. It felt almost as good as the first shower after coming back to himself, when his body smelled peculiar and unfamiliar, like other people’s houses. </p><p>Now, he stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror, running his palms across his belly, and the jut of his elbows. Through the unfamiliarly-long hair on his head and the wild curls of his pubic hair. The axe wound looked a bit better than yesterday, at least—and he was slowly coming around to the idea of having a mysterious scar that was big enough to convey that it came from something serious enough to be life-threatening, and more than just the emergency exit for a diseased appendix.</p><p>There was at least two weeks’ worth of stubble on his jaw. Half of it was grown by him—the other half of it, he supposed, wasn’t. A fresh start was one hundred percent in order, but his beautiful old shaving set was off the table without Margo to help: he didn’t have the motor skills to manage—solo—something as delicate as sliding a single blade into its head. </p><p>Plus, letting his left hand handle something so weapon-like felt dubious. </p><p>The electric clippers tucked half-forgotten under his sink would have to do. </p><p>With every buzzing swipe, the shape of his face came back to him. It was helpful, somehow, to glare at his reflection and slowly trace its contours—kind of like that viral video of the cat realizing that its reflection had ears, like: <em> oh, right, I’m not just a brain floating in goo, but this frowny part and this nubby cartilage-y part belong to me, too. </em> After his jaw, he tackled his armpit hair, pubic hair, chest hair. He hunted down the long ones at the top of his feet and toes, and the ones that sometimes sprouted up across his shoulders. </p><p>The process took on a methodical, ritualistic intensity, like he was preparing himself for burial, and after a good half hour’s work he was nearly satisfied except for the unruly hair on his head. </p><p>It was way too fucking long, too not-him. It took all of his—frankly, <em> waning </em> —self-control not to take nail scissors and clippers to that too, to crop it all right down to his skull until he was smooth like a monk. <em> Clean slate, or whatever. </em> But, on second thought, it was all getting a little bit too Richie Tenenbaum, so he put the clippers away and resolved to ask Kady to fix it later.</p><p>For now, he just needed to not look like the Monster. </p><p>After some digging around, he found a hair elastic shoved at the back of one of the vanity drawers and fumbled and yanked his hair into some approximation of a bun. Margo would <em> absolutely </em> roast him about it later, because the whole vibe didn’t <em> not </em> scream Hozier-slash-rude-barista, but it would do. He’d never worn his hair like this—he’d never really let it get so out of hand that he even <em> could. </em>But seeing his hair pulled up and out of his clean-ish face felt familiar in a confusing, echoey way, like hearing a song on the radio and knowing all the words even though you could swear up and down you’d never heard it before.</p><p>It took a while to click, frowning and un-frowning at his reflection, and inspecting the crinkled lines that stayed behind on his forehead, and he nearly pulled the elastic out and mussed his hair back up until it finally <em> did </em> click: Quentin always said something nice when Eliot wore his hair like this, so Eliot kept wearing his hair like this. Or, at least—that <em> other version of him</em>, the one in Fillory. The one that had a husband and a son, and who was stuck inside of him now, clinging to his ribs like a parasitic twin and injecting poisonous little memories into his brain.</p><p>The other version of him wore his hair like this, because Quentin likes it. </p><p>Liked it.</p><p>“Didn’t you, Q?” he murmured, then winced.</p><p>Eliot was never great with death. </p><p>By the time he was old enough to talk, it was pretty clear that the farmer’s gene had skipped him—that corn-fed personality trait slash defect that made you both affectionate toward animals and also able to shoot a bolt between their trusting eyes with ease. Or, at least, Eliot figured it was a <em> nature </em> thing and not a <em> nurture </em> thing, had to be, since his dad’s efforts to inject cruelty into his psyche by osmosis hadn’t gotten very far.</p><p>When his Auntie Joan died he went on pretending she was still alive for months afterward, whispering to her in bed at night, and while he got ready for school in the morning. He was thirteen when a sudden, miserable bout of esophageal cancer—<em> that cruel, rancid cunt </em>—ripped her away from him, and he was way too old for an invisible friend. But pretending she was nearby and still listening to him, the way she used to when she’d call every Sunday afternoon, made him feel less alone. </p><p>He would have full conversations with her, imagining that she was sitting in the corner and nodding along as he told her all about the really great dogs he saw on his bike ride to school, or the black eye he’d earned by talking back to Logan Kinear and his gang of degenerates after last-period algebra; or (especially) about how worried he was about starting high school, and how he  couldn’t wait to get out of this piece of shit town in this piece of shit state. How he wished he could come to live with her in her big, creaky home in Massachusetts. </p><p>She had twelve cats named after Greek philosophers (his favourite was a one-eyed old tom named Diogenes, who was dingy-grey and appropriately surly), and a massive gorgeous kitchen straight out of <em> Practical Magic </em>in which he was pretty sure she did lesbian witchcraft; he wasn’t sure how that differed from regular old witchcraft, but, still, he was pretty sure.</p><p>Maybe most importantly, when he would talk to her—her memory, or spirit, or whatever—she would talk back. He would answer her imagined questions and laugh at her jokes, and if he closed his eyes and listened hard, he could almost convince himself that he could still hear her slapping her thigh and laughing her croaky laugh.</p><p>Combing through Facebook, Eliot found out that her friends had held a memorial for her—but he’d missed it, and his dad hadn’t told him it was happening at all. Within weeks of her death, her cats were put down and her house was up for sale at thirty percent below market price. All of her things left inside of it were sent to the landfill—not even donated, not even <em> sold at auction </em>where Eliot could have tried to secure a tiny piece of her online using a prepaid VISA and a secret P.O. Box. Everything left of her was gone, like deleting a file and emptying the recycle bin. His dad was content to scrub her out of existence and take the money she’d left to Eliot to re-fence the horse pastures. Eliot wasn’t even allowed to talk about her, afterward—he only tried once, and his dad had broken a chair on the wall next to his head. It was like it wasn’t enough to get rid of her physical remnants; if he could, his dad would have cut open his skull and tried to scrape her out, bit by bit, from there, too.</p><p>So, indignantly, he kept her alive in his own quiet, private way, and some part of him knew with utter certainty that if there was any possibility at all in this mysterious, shitty fucking universe that she could continue to watch over him and listen, he could count on her to.</p><p>It was nice for a while. It helped. But then his dad caught him. </p><p>It was the final straw for Richard Waugh, who had long sensed this horrible, mutant softness in his son that he hadn’t managed to drive out with occasional doses of sharp cruelty that pricked like thorns amongst long, and somehow worse, stretches of ignoring the fact that Eliot existed at all. In retrospect, staying mostly-ignored would have been a blessing.</p><p>Eliot didn’t remember how his dad found out, only the aftermath. He remembered being pulled by his bicep very late at night—or maybe very early in the morning—out into the icy, wet April air, and the polished wooden handle of a knife being placed in his hand. He was still in his boxers and a t-shirt, no shoes on, but he knew better than to speak. So he stood, shivering, the wet creeping into his socks and leaving them sodden and freezing, gripping the knife like a lifeline. Very briefly, he allowed himself to consider putting it between his dad’s ribs.</p><p>And then his dad went around back, behind the shed, and brought Millie with him under one arm.</p><p>Millie was Eliot’s 4H goat—she was his, and only his, from the moment she was old enough to be weaned from her mom. The whole thing with 4H is that little kids are handed baby animals that they hand-raise for a year—feeding them, caring for them, growing to love them like pets. And then, time’s up: they go to auction, or they become supper. It was supposed to teach farm kids the circle of life, and farming skills, and agricultural commerce, <em> or whatever</em>. All Eliot learned was that animal husbandry was extremely not his thing except for this sweet, doe-eyed, goofy little creature, and that the idea of letting her go was like being asked to cut off his right foot. Probably in any other circumstances his dad would have shot Millie out back just to prove a point, if not for the fact that his dad’s massive, gentle work horse, Big Joe, had taken a shine to her. Horses and their comfort goats, man—it’s a thing. For some reason, they love each other. So, because Big Joe worked harder when she was around, Millie was spared. But Eliot’s father had never been above cutting off his nose to spite his face.</p><p>“No more of this shit,” his dad growled. She was so tame that he barely had to hold her still. Her little slit-pupiled eyes lolled toward Eliot’s and she let out a happy bleat of recognition. “I work all fucking night and day to feed you, to feed your mother, and you can’t even pull your weight around here? No more fantasy bullshit, no more imaginary friends. No more stealing your ma’s makeup. It’s time you grow the fuck up. Get over here, boy.”</p><p>His dad might have called him a slur, then, for the first time but not the last. Now, Eliot couldn’t remember if his recollection was completely accurate, or if the slur had just been a pulsating subtext, like an underpainting below the red ink of his dad’s words. </p><p>“Do it,” he spat. “Do it or I’ll make it worse for her.”</p><p>And then, because he was weak, Eliot had nodded and stepped forward as his dad lifted Millie’s snout—roughly, exposing her throat. Unbothered, she licked the salt off his nicotine-stained fingers. He was never kind to her, but she liked that he smelled like Big Joe. Eliot wanted to close his eyes, but he forced himself to keep them open. </p><p>“Do it.”</p><p>The knife went in easy. She only struggled for a second. Her blood was warm on his cold hands.</p><p>Afterward, he didn’t know why he went along with it. Nothing his dad could have done to him would have been worse than the trust that stayed in her eyes even as the light faded from them. What was the fucking point of pretending that he could be this distorted version of the man that his dad wanted him to be? Anyway, that Vonnegut line and all—you are who you pretend to be, so be careful who you pretend to be, or whatever. Turns out, it’s true. After Millie, Eliot was responsible for every minor act of slaughter that followed on the farm. Every pig and chicken for supper. Every calf born lame. </p><p>He never quite worked out whether it was his punishment for partaking in his father’s lie about who he was—or who he could have been, if he tried hard enough—or if it was his retribution for holding on to ghosts. </p><p>Margo knew that story, because of secrets magic and the Trials. He couldn’t remember if Quentin did, too. He’d had a lifetime to tell it to him, so he supposed he probably did.</p><p>Eliot’s left hand twitched again, for the first time all morning, and he balled it into a fist. </p><p>He should probably tell Margo about the hand thing, too. The only problem was that he really didn’t fucking want to. Speaking it out loud would make it real, and—and probably the hand thing was just from drinking too much and wallowing in his own misery to the point of triggering a bit of post-traumatic <em> something</em>. Or maybe he came back to himself with a bit of brain damage. That didn’t even completely alarm him, either—considering his plentiful and varied consumption of chemicals, it’s not like he historically treated his body like some kind of brain cell nature conservationist. </p><p>What really made his palms sweat was that, if he told Margo, she would dig down to the probable, horrible truth of it, which was that the Monster was still inside his body. A fugitive, Miss Frizzle-ing around his ecosystem until it found a way to mutiny the USS Waugh. But—even if that were happening, which it absolutely was not—he wasn’t going to let it happen again.</p><p><em> I’m the fucking Captain now, </em>thought Eliot, crazily. </p><p>Still glaring himself down in the mirror, he muttered: “I really fucking miss you, Q.”</p><p>It felt good, and awful, and illicit, and <em> important </em> to say it out loud. To pretend, just for a second, that Quentin could hear him. And then he bandaged his wound and pulled on some clothes—which ones, it didn’t matter—and went downstairs, because he still didn’t trust himself—this body—enough to be alone. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>For twenty minutes, Quentin paced in circles like a zoo tiger. </p><p>With every lap of the room, he became more certain that he didn’t want to be dead. </p><p>Of course, that was different from wanting to be alive, which he wasn’t sure he wanted either. It was like knocking off options on a multiple-choice exam until he got to something worth circling: the best answer wasn’t necessarily the only right one.</p><p>Now that he was locked in this room—he’d rattled the handle and maybe also thrown his shoulder into it a few times, <em> just to be sure—</em>forging onward into the mysterious jungles of the spooky Goddamn dentist chair, and toward maybe becoming not-dead, seemed like his best—and maybe only—option. Pacing a hole in the glowing floor wasn’t going to help. He had to give the Underworld’s Veldt a whirl, start dicking around to find its Rainbow Road glitch, so he could—so he could—</p><p>So he could figure out what to do next.</p><p>Fuck. </p><p>Quentin wiped his palms on his jeans. They weren’t sweaty, but it made him feel better to pretend his body was still a body, the way ex-smokers get those little menthol plastic things to puff on after they quit. <em> Coping mechanisms, </em> he thought, <em> I’m good at those. </em>He was also getting pretty good at quests, which this sort of was. Real quests didn’t just lead you along the garden path, from point A to point B. You had to find a trail and diligently follow it, and you had to go seeking in order to find.</p><p>In any event, if he was going to do something, he had to do it now-ish. The clock was ticking. He probably didn’t have long until the PTB figured out his switcheroo and sent the Underworld’s muscle to snatch him up by the scruff of his neck and send him packing to the neverending bright lights: Closing time, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. </p><p>Quentin approached the chair and poked it with one finger. Pulling it away, a little dent stayed behind in the soft pleather upholstery and residual magic licked at his skin, eager and puppy-like. It was willing him to come play. </p><p>“This is so fucking stupid,” he said aloud, kind of hoping Joe heard it.</p><p>Lowering himself onto the very edge of its seat, so that his ass barely brushed the cushion, the chair’s magic alighted under and around him as if he was kindling tossed onto smoldering coals. It pulled him closer, like invisible little nymph hands were grabbing at his shoulders and chest and hips—clasping themselves around him like disconcertingly-strong seatbelts. His body slid back into the chair without any effort of his own, feet lifting up, up, up from the floor and shoulders pressing against the cushioned curve of the chair’s back.</p><p>Probably he should have panicked. Instead, he sank into it like a hot bath—it’d been so long since he had felt magic like this. Maybe not since his Brakebills interview, when magic had entered his body and flowed back out of it again in such a tangible, harnessable way that it felt like he was holding the reins to a fleet of galloping Clydesdales. It swirled around his toes, tickled warmly up his legs, snuck into the soft spot behind his balls and stroked at his lower spine. Every muscle in his body tensed, then relaxed. </p><p><em> Well—here goes absolutely fucking nothing. </em> Quentin shut his eyes against the room’s pulsing light and for a long while he thought of nothing at all. </p><p>He became nothing, and he was nothing.</p><p>And then, almost by accident, and for the very first time since he arrived in the Underworld, he thought about his dad. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Eliot sat at the dining room table, knees bouncing and heels tapping against the ground. The Cottage was unusually quiet, save for the sound of his own fidgeting and—</p><p>“You good over there, buddy?” Josh asked around a noisy mouthful of eggs. </p><p>—and Josh.</p><p>Eliot’s eggs—scrambled by Josh to perfect fluffiness and topped with a thoughtful sprinkle of chives and Aleppo pepper and almost certainly cold and gelatinous by now—were pushed aside in favour of mechanically swapping between drumming his fingers on the table and flipping through his phone to read snippets of the news on Twitter and the occasional text from Margo, who was out with Kady grabbing spell supplies from a hedge trader for Alice.</p><p>(<em> Thank God, </em>he thought, then felt bad about it.)</p><p>Alice was off somewhere, too—it was the first time she’d the Cottage in days. Probably she was at the library running up the world’s longest IOU tab. The one with the lower-case l at Brakebills and not the interdimensional one. As far as Eliot understood, Alice now had a particularly strained relationship with the latter, involving imprisonment and—well, Eliot wasn’t sure what else. He wasn’t strictly listening when Alice mentioned it in a clipped tone the last time someone asked if she could pop over to see if Zelda might have a book on<em> such-and-such, </em> but he sussed that the Library was a no-go zone (literally, and conversationally).</p><p>Julia and AU Penny (he had to stop mentally referring to him like that or else one of these days it was going to sneak out of his mouth) were putting out feelers for help in Thailand, where the magicians were so well-versed in the physical and metaphysical reality of ghosts that it was like millennials with The Office trivia. Despite his efforts to sheepdog his thoughts away from shitty fucking miserable thoughts like this one, Eliot wondered if that’s what Q was now—a ghost. </p><p><em> For now</em>, he corrected himself. Even if he was a ghost, they were, you know, working on making that not a thing—and if it stayed a thing, then Eliot was going to have to revisit the previous renegotiation with himself in which he’d decided that maybe he actually would like to try to make it past thirty-five.</p><p>He kept letting himself have crumbs of hope, then snatching it back away from himself, like he was a child playing with a choking hazard. The idea of—maybe, eventually, if he was lucky—stroking the warm skin hiding under the hem of Quentin’s shirt (<em>again</em>); or feeling Quentin’s hand secretly brush the edge of his own under the table (<em>again</em>); or feeling Quentin’s hair falling against his inner thigh (<em>again</em>). The idea of fixing the beautiful thing that he broke. Those were the things he was going to try to<em>—was trying to—</em>fight for, if they got Quentin back and things worked out in other, even more distant and hypothetical and scary ways that Eliot couldn’t bring himself to wish for.</p><p><em> Jesus Christ. Stop it, fucking stop it. </em> Eliot smacked one hand against his temple, then regretted it as Josh snapped his head up to peer at him. </p><p>Josh was the only one left behind at the Cottage, put on not-at-all sneaky babysitting duty by Margo. It mostly involved staying within fifteen feet of Eliot and pretending that he wasn’t casually following him from room to room on a five-minute lag—and Eliot was letting him, because he fuckin’ needed a babysitter. It was grounding to know that there was a safeguard in place to make sure he didn’t go into a panic spiral and attempt to chop his own hand off. Not that Josh knew that <em> that </em> was on the table. </p><p>Probably he was working off of a game plan that involved slapping pre-noon alcohol out of Eliot’s grip or, like, preventing him from attempting any particularly stupid, explosive resurrection magic.</p><p>“So, I was thinking.” Josh was still staring at him, an uncomfortable wince still pulling at the corner of his mouth. “Maybe, after your appointment with Faye, we could give those legs a stretch and go for a little spin around campus? Get some fresh air, maybe grab a croissant and a matcha latte—”</p><p>“I’m not sure Fogg wants us going free range and scaring the first years.” </p><p>“Fair. If you ask me, I’m surprised he hasn’t warded this place up the yazoo and burned the Cottage down just to keep us, specifically, out. Anyway, I don’t think the first years would even blink at us—ambient’s at a record high and they’re all doped up and self-important on being able to cast intro-level spells on the first try. Those kids don’t know how good they have it. Plus, we’re theoretically still students, unless there’s a diploma or expulsion letter addressed to me that I don’t know about.”</p><p>“It’s in the junk drawer in the kitchen.”</p><p>“Wait, really?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Phew.” Josh looked genuinely relieved. “I know it’s stupid since, like, the apocalypse keeps sort of happening? And, like, what’s the point of getting a gold star saying I graduated if I can already <em> do </em> the magic thing, and nobody’s ever going to ask to see a transcript? But I still keep thinking I should meet with a faculty advisor to go over my course credits situation.”</p><p>“At this point, they might be willing to round up just to get rid of at least one of us.”</p><p>“Good point.” Josh paused. “So, where do you stand on a matcha latte?”</p><p>“You don’t have to take me for a walkie like I’m an elderly golden retriever. Or your Grandma Bertha.”</p><p>“I’ll have you know I used to take my Grandma Bertha out for a walk every single week to keep her joints limber, and she was <em> very appreciative. </em> And all the blue-haired gals at the old folks’ home thought I was very dashing.” Josh grinned a little. “Go on and eat your eggs before you hurt my feelings.”</p><p>Eliot snorted, but he didn’t pick up his fork. His phone buzzed with a text from Margo: </p><p>
  <span class="u"> <em> You change your bandages? </em> </span>
</p><p>Eliot tried not to be annoyed by the question. </p><p><span class="u"><em> Yep</em></span>, he typed back—his left thumb started to go rogue on the screen, so he sat on it and did his best with his right hand alone.</p><p>
  <span class="u"> <em> You being nice to my man? </em> </span>
</p><p>
  <span class="u"> <em> Absolutely not. </em> </span>
</p><p>Eliot returned to riffling through one of the dozens of books densely piled by Alice like mountain ranges across the table. Some had esoteric names like <em> Majorie Llewellyn’s Compleat Booke of Correspondenses </em> and were probably pulled from some dust-crusted bottom shelf from the Brakebills library; others looked like they were freshly delivered from Amazon, like a new, millennial-pink bound copy of Crowley’s <em> Book of the Law—</em>standard-issue First Year reading as a teachable example of a book that was 99% horseshit and 1% laser-accurate insight into communing with Nut, the Thelemic goddess of Death.</p><p>His phone buzzed again: </p><p>
  <span class="u"> <em> Just suck it up and let people fuss over you, will ya?</em> </span>
</p><p>He didn’t answer her, but he did clear his throat and add magnanimously, like a United Nations delegate, “The pasta was good last night. Thanks for that.” </p><p>Missile to D4. Josh’s chest puffed up, pleased—Eliot had made a direct hit on his love language. “Glad you liked it. I found some wicked guanciale at this tiny Italian import shop in Queens and,” he made a chef’s kiss gesture that Eliot found both endearing and punchable, “I swear you could literally taste the Spanish countryside in it.”</p><p>“Rad.”</p><p>Still sitting on his left hand, Eliot busied himself with the task of avoiding further conversation with Josh—which he was generally skilled at, regardless of the context—and working on his fine motor skills (the <em> fwip </em>of the books’ pages under his right thumb was satisfying as he paged through them, practicing Popper stretching exercises with his left hand tucked under the table). In the meantime, he logicked his way down the garden path of what was real and what was not. </p><p>He was not being bodysnatched again—and the Monster was <em> not </em> still in his body—because there was no way that Margo had Lizzie Bordened him in the gut and Quentin had died for nothing. Obviously, the Monster was floating in the Seam like George Clooney in that Alfonso Cuaron movie that wasn’t nearly as much like <em> Y Tu Mamá También </em> as Eliot would’ve liked and—and the fucking reality of the situation was that he just had to get his shit together. Stop drinking. Get normal. Easy as pie. </p><p>The hand thing was probably psychosomatic, like that time he took two too many tabs at Oculto and spent the next three months convinced that he was having spinal fluid acid flashbacks, when really he was just smoking too much of Josh’s sativa hybrid that was too close a kissing cousin to salvia to be consumed during daylight hours. </p><p>Eliot gripped the edge of the table to keep reality feeling the right way up, flexing his fingers against the comforting grounding-ness of the wood—like planting one foot flat on the floor beside the bed to fight the spins. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, one of those ones pulled straight down toward his diaphragm he learned in middle school when he made the mistake of taking drama class, thinking that it would help him fit in but soon finding out that it only further alienated him as the unmistakably queer kid now willingly participating in motherfucking <em> musicals </em>—</p><p>A bang like a judge’s gavel jarred him back to reality. </p><p>“What the <em> fuck</em>, Eliot?” </p><p>Josh was looking at him incredulously, eyes bugging and his hands raised over his head like he was protecting himself from a blow from the heavens. A chunk of drywall was missing in the space beyond his head, and there was a plume of  little motes of sheetrock or asbestos or whatever floating in the air, glinting in the morning light.</p><p>“What the fuck <em> what? </em> What happened?” </p><p>Josh bent down, disappearing below the edge of the table. When he surfaced, he was holding up an old, heavy-looking book—showily, like he was displaying it for the studio audience on <em> The Price is Right</em>.</p><p>“I’m not following.”</p><p>Josh rolled his eyes and tossed it onto the table in front of him. It made a leathery thwap as it landed: <em> Speaking to the Dead: A History of Necromancy, from Marlowe to Kieckhefer</em>. He glanced at the gold-inlaid title, pressed deep into the cracked leather, then at Josh, and—what the fuck?</p><p>“You wanna explain why you just yossed that at my head, Koufax?”</p><p>“Why I what?” He was beginning to have a sneaking suspicion <em> what</em>, but he hoped that whatever words next out of Josh’s mouth would be literally anything other than fucking <em> what</em>.</p><p>“Look, I get it that you’re—you don’t like me. Buddy, <em> I get it,” </em> he stressed, holding his hands out in front of him like he was soothing an angry dog. “Things are bad right now, and I’ve been doing a lot of reading about, you know, the process of healing from injuries, and autonomy-related trauma, and I know there’s a whole shitpile of anger mixed up with frustration and all that, and—well, you don’t need to know all that. And I also know you and I aren’t exactly buddy comedy material—and, like, I know it’s not even the whole thing with Margo, but, look—it’s fine. I’m okay with you not liking me, if we could at least settle on you not trying to concuss me with fucking library books.”</p><p>“I don’t—”</p><p>As he began to speak, Eliot’s left hand started to crawl away from where it had previously been gripping the edge of the table. It took a moment for either of them to notice—Josh did, first, and then Eliot, from the growing confusion that was replacing Josh’s expression of pissed-off indignance. </p><p>He looked over to find his hand moving topside to crawl (there was no better word for it; it was like a fucking <em> salamander, </em> each digit an articulated limb) across the surface of the table, before snatching up a chewed-on Bic discarded on a yellow legal pad scribbled nearly entirely black with Alice’s round, looping handwriting. </p><p>It had to reach far enough for the pen that Eliot’s shoulder jerked over to the side. He felt boneless, jelly-like, unable to move to resist it. It took up the pen with a supernaturally strong grip—or at least, that’s what it looked like, because Eliot <em> couldn’t actually feel it.  </em></p><p>It was a similar sort of nothingness to when your leg falls asleep, except without the near-painful tingling at the edges of his nerves reminding him that if he rubbed it vigorously enough to get the blood flowing again, the feeling would come back. He could see the pen, and he could see his fingers beginning to roughly flip the pad’s pages, trying to find one that wasn’t filled to the brim with tangles of Alice’s written and rewritten and crossed-out spellwork, but he couldn’t fucking feel his fingers moving. </p><p>It was like watching a movie, like everything was happening entirely outside of him. </p><p>There might as well have been a laugh track in the background.</p><p>“Eliot?” Josh’s voice was faraway-sounding. “What’s—is something happening?”</p><p>Eliot closed his eyes for a long moment to rouse his telekinesis like an old dog sleeping in the sun. It was lazy after a week of not being called upon to do much beyond whisk cigarettes out of cardboard packages or pull his socks off before he collapsed into bed. The magic that was in his body like an invisible limb was a thing of power that he often took for granted, or shunned because it made him feel strange and other. Which was, frankly, stupid. Especially now, when he was like Bambi on ice trying to figure out how to Ratatouille his own body—a mishmash of too many bad Disney references but, whatever. It didn’t matter that his hands were unwieldy and stupid-clumsy as he worked on reinhabiting himself post-Monster, like a sea snail working its soft body into the crevasses of a scavenged shell; he had magic in him. </p><p>Like Penny, he wasn’t just able to handle magic like a tool, he was a <em> thing of magic </em>and curious Midwestern origin. He was strong and hardy stock, and he ought to fucking remember it. </p><p>He reached out to wrap his consciousness around his wrist and—</p><p>“Gotcha, you little fucker.”</p><p>His mental grip on it was strong enough to lift the hand from the table, the pen still gripped in its fingers and writing in space. He slowly reached for his cane and stood up, and it took all of his concentration to counteract the hand’s attempts to drag him back down.</p><p>“El? Forgive me for asking the stupid question, but. Are you going a little bit Devon Sawa right now?”</p><p>“I gotta—” Eliot began, but there wasn’t enough air in his lungs to explain, and so he turned on his heels and rushed upstairs as quickly as his legs would allow. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>In retrospect, Quentin couldn’t believe that it took him so long. </p><p>Shouldn’t his dad have been the first thought that crossed his mind when Joe approached him on the platform? Wasn’t that the choice that faced him in that moment? He could take the uncertain road potentially leading back to Earth, and to the people still there, and to time and aging and consequences and pain, or be delivered to whatever the afterlife was meant to look like for him and maybe seeing his dad again—and reckoning with the other choice he made. </p><p>Now he found himself in the living room of his parents’ house in Montclair, back when it was his parents’ house and not just, like, <em> his mom’s house, </em> post-divorce. </p><p>The room was disorientingly dark. His eyes needed a moment to adjust from the steady glow of the Underworld, but he recognized it immediately from the smell of the pot-pourri that his mom scattered around the house in heavy crystal bowls. </p><p>Blinking against the white-blue light emanating from one corner of the room, he registered that an Eagles game was playing on the hefty TV set shoved in the corner of the room, on top of a chunky, unstylish oak entertainment centre piled with VHS recordings of TV shows. Well, fuck—he’d bamfed into the mid-90s. Briefly distracted by reading the tapes’ spines—<em>The X-Files, Seinfeld, Home Improvement, </em>Jesus Christ—it took him a while to realize that his dad was sitting barely three feet away, reclined in the cracked leather La-Z-Boy that his mom always hated. </p><p>The ping of recognition knocked the wind out of him.</p><p>“Dad?” Quentin hazarded—leaving his throat, his voice was shakier than he expected. Louder, this time: “Dad?”</p><p>His dad didn’t react, still facing the screen. From where Quentin stood, he could only see the back of his head. </p><p>Quentin stayed frozen for a while, listening numbly to the sports announcer shill Alka-Seltzer in rapid-fire between plays. He couldn’t will his feet to un-stick from the carpet to walk around to the front of him. Speaking of, Quentin thought he could <em> feel </em> the thick pile of the rug under his shoes but the tufts didn’t move or react when his feet—apparently?—came in contact with it. He leaned down to drag his fingers across the floor. While his hand didn’t pass through it into the basement, it felt like mostly nothing. Although, if he thought hard enough about it? He was pretty sure he could feel the scratchy polyester on his fingertips, but he also might just be  fooling himself.</p><p>He stood up again and glanced between the cream sponge-painted walls, the slipcovered couch, and the framed pictures of aunts and uncles and cousins he hadn’t seen or even thought about for years. Their posed and outfit-coordinated photos, full of fluffy bangs and glitter lip gloss, were lined up like a funeral receiving line on the mantle over the fireplace. </p><p>Out of scientific curiosity, and only a little bit of spite, Quentin reached out with one hand to try to swipe the picture frames onto the floor. Instead of a satisfying crash of shattering glass, his hand passed through the frames without even a tingly whoosh of particles through his immaterial body. It was like being in a float chamber. Absolute nothingness—Quentin the Apathetic Ghost.</p><p>He was simultaneously angry at himself for this detour on his quest—he had decided to treat it like one, because that too felt brain-soothingly familiar—and strangely glad for it. It almost definitely wasn’t going to lead him out of here, because probably this is how everyone spends their Bonus Afterlife Time—visiting family and making virtual reality amends (the phrase <em> piss oyster </em> popped into his head, uninvited, and he made a face). Hell, if the Underworld was even remotely capitalism-minded and gave a shit about Earth dollars, it could probably package this shit and sell it to the Betty Ford Center for millions.</p><p>Anyway—<em>right. </em> His dad. Fuck. Gathering up his courage and wielding it like a wobbly shield, Quentin walked around the side of his dad’s chair to greet him. Immediately, seeing his face—mid-thirties, still with most of his hair, no jowls or deep creases at the corners of his eyes—dragged an unexpected, wet, ragged sob out of his chest. </p><p>It was startling after hours of mostly-numbed-out confusion in the Underworld, as if a battering ram of emotions knocked him on his ass. Feelings, and the experience of feeling them, came back to him in Technicolor, like he was a character in <em> Pleasantville</em>. Quentin grappled with them, as if pulled into a fistfight, squirming to get back out of their grasp and back into the safe arms of the emptiness he’d had before. It didn’t work. Tears burned at the corners of his eyes and he roughly wiped them away with the sleeve of his hoodie.</p><p>He tried again. “Hi, Dad.” </p><p>It came out as a whisper. Ted didn’t respond. It didn’t matter.</p><p>The TV was on so fucking loud—although probably he was just oversensitive after the quiet of the chair room—and a personal injury ad flipped to that ubiquitous Pure Moods mixed CD commercial. Enigma’s <em> Age of Innocence </em> and a voice-over celebrating “today’s New Age hits!” prodded at him like a wet finger in the ear—and then was joined by the piercing sound of his mom, calling out to see if his dad was “going to take the garbage out tonight or will the kitchen just have to smell like rotten broccoli until tomorrow? Ted? Jesus Christ, Ted! Can you turn that down?” </p><p>Her voice made Quentin jump. The sound of it, but also the idea that she was in the same area code as his father. Ted didn’t answer, but he did turn that down. </p><p>With the commercials at a less eardrum-piercing level, Quentin also realized that he could hear <em> himself </em> in the other room: playing alone and narrating what sounded like a made-up story about dinosaurs and vampires. Weird, as always. Little Quentin had no idea that within the next year his dad would have an emotional affair with some too-young intern at work, and his mom would light his dad’s clothes on fire in the master bathroom tub nearly setting the whole fucking house ablaze, and then, <em> sayonara </em> two-parent household.</p><p>Quentin looked back at Ted’s face, expressionless and glowing like the moon in the TV’s light, familiar but also not. Logically, he knew that it was his dad, but it didn’t feel quite like his dad—it was like listening to a cover song of a cover song. The emotional beats were there, but everything felt a bit off.</p><p>Why didn’t his brain bring him to a good memory? Or even a meaningful one? Why a fucking week night in Montclair, at some random point in the timeline of his life when his parents had already developed a healthy hatred for each other? </p><p>Probably he could just close his eyes and will himself somewhere else: to the day when they went to the aquarium in Camden and his dad let him ride on his shoulders as sharks swam overhead through the glassed-in tunnel and he’d reached out with grubby fingers to try to pet their wiggly bellies; or when his dad used to pick him up from kindergarten and bring him for hard ice cream on Friday evenings after school, their own little shared secret from his mom. </p><p>But what for? At best, he was setting himself up for disappointment. Sitting on the outside would never feel the same as actually experiencing those moments, and certainly wouldn’t live up to his rosy recollection of them. Isn’t that the saying—never meet your heroes, and never relive your scant handful of soothing childhood memories?</p><p>A bubble of squeaky laughter erupted from the next room. Little Quentin couldn’t be older than 4, content to play alone under the dining room table and already so wrapped up in his own little imaginary worlds. Maybe this actually was a good memory. He had his parents, and his toys. Puberty and the chronic chemical imbalance in his brain hadn’t yet descended on him like a dementor. His dad still looked relatively happy, too—handsome, even. Not sick yet.</p><p>He thought that seeing his dad again, back when it might’ve sort’ve been the good old days, would make him feel something more than just empty-sad. Not better, necessarily, just—something like closure, maybe? At the very least, he hoped that it would make the guilt snaking through his guts, twisting itself around his liver and gripping his heart like a fist unclench a little, or at least shimmy out of the way so his lungs could fully expand instead of feeling like his entire system was working to accommodate his shame like an extra, vestigial organ. But it didn’t. The fist only clenched tighter, digging its nails in.</p><p>He carried around so many metastasizing, ugly things inside of him. A walking Pandora’s box with a shitty latch.</p><p>“It’s really good to see you, dad.” </p><p>Quentin’s voice sounded strange to his own ears, like he was submerged in the old claw-foot bathtub in the apartment that he and Julia used to share. The one he used to climb into, full and steaming-hot, and sit staring at the wall, listening to water drip steadily from the tap until he noticed he was shivering. It was the location of so much idle ideation that he’d talked himself deep into and then shrugged off just as easy, like he’d fallen down a well and then Lassie’d himself back out of it again—never actually doing the deed for no reason except that <em> the least he could do </em> was not subject Julia to that fucking clean-up job. </p><p>That period of his life felt like a lifetime ago. Technically, it was. </p><p>Folding his legs into a pretzel, Quentin lowered himself to the ground at Ted’s feet and peered up at him. If he started to think too hard about the mechanics of sitting on the floor rather than passing through it into the unfinished basement, his corporeal form started to sink lower down and merge with the high-pile carpet; so, he tried not to think about it too hard. Pink elephants.</p><p>“I thought about how I wanted to see you again and I just—<em>poof</em>, ended up here. That’s kind of funny, right?” </p><p>Ted kept staring over the top of Quentin’s head, or maybe through his forehead, like Quentin had the same hole there as Julia did in her belly, the last time they were in the Underworld. </p><p>“I know this probably isn’t some kind of ghost AA chance at amends, but maybe my brain just knew I wanted to talk to you, so it sent me somewhere I could just—” he gestured around at the empty room, “<em> talk. </em> They told me I could go anywhere in the world, and talking to you was the first thing I thought of after I—” </p><p><em> After he what? Jesus Christ. </em>Quentin grit his jaw and steeled himself to finally fucking say it. </p><p>“I died, dad. We never really had all that much in common but I—uh. I guess we have that, now.” His breath hitched. “And the fact that—you know, both times were—both were my fault, basically. Not even basically—God, you can’t even hear me right now and I’m still equivocating.” </p><p>Before he died, Quentin made a choice that killed his dad, because letting go of magic felt like the worse option. The idea of losing magic forever felt like a more real version of dying than any of the suicidal ideation he’d ever entertained in his life up ‘til then—even though <em> having </em>magic didn’t make him happier, or cooler, or fixed anything about his life. Especially not the things he thought might be fixed if only he could find something he was good at, or passionate about, or that felt like it might give him a Goddamn glimpse at meaning rather than the sluggish dissatisfaction that, since puberty, had slowly sucked him deeper like quicksand. </p><p>But then, Brakebills and magic burst into his life. Boom. </p><p>Picking magic was a decision made resolutely and with as much strength of will as Quentin had ever mustered in his life. <em> He had to pick magic. </em> Otherwise, he would be letting go of the only thing that was <em> his, </em>the only thing that gave his life mystery and, if not purpose, then something like hope—and he’d being doing so with the quiet knowledge that he’d—metaphorically, but maybe not only metaphorically—be putting himself right back in that chipped enamel bathtub with a note tucked under his bedroom pillow, dragging his thumb along the raised river of veins branching through his wrist and wondering if he should e-transfer someone, Julia probably, to cover any outstanding phone bills or insurance premiums he’d forgotten to clear up ahead of time. Only this time, he would know for sure that there was nothing else out there for him, instead of just wondering about it. </p><p>It was the only choice. He fucking <em> knew </em>that. But the lingering question he couldn’t wrap his stupid brain around for the last few months, was—why did he still hate himself for making it? </p><p>The weight of his decision to bring back magic still felt like he’d swallowed a lead ball that was stuck in his intestines, pulling him down like an anchor. At first, he’d thought that the only way to know he had made the right choice and fully taken responsibility for it, like a fucking man, would be to feel at peace with it. As if for every hour the guilt still gnawed at him, the choice didn’t count as brave, or genuine, or anything other than a selfish attempt to keep hold of the one thing that had ever made him feel like he had a place and a purpose.</p><p>Now, poking at that guilt like a bruise, he realized there was something else wriggling around inside of him like an eel he couldn’t get his hands around. It was a slimy shame kept fatted on the truth of the fact that some part of him always knew that, by mending the mirror and choosing oblivion, it meant that he wouldn’t have to be around when Eliot woke up. </p><p>In the heat of that moment in the mirror realm, it felt like a better option to die saving Eliot’s life (not really, technically, but it still somehow utterly felt that way) than to face him again and be forced to unpack the—terrifying, unrequited—longing that had been relit within him by Eliot’s rescue flare warning that he was still alive. </p><p>
  <em> Peaches and plums, motherfucker.  </em>
</p><p>There was a lot of bullshit in his Pandora’s box.<em> Jesus Christ, </em> thought Quentin, <em> I am a container for every bad thing. </em></p><p>He reached out to touch the cuff of Ted’s pants; even though he knew he wouldn’t feel anything, his fingers didn’t quite pass through the corduroy and Quentin let himself believe that he could feel the fuzz of the cloth under this thumb. Idly, he wondered if someone was watching him—some bored Underworld security guard, plopped in front of a closed-circuit magic television and watching him reckon with mortality and making sure he didn’t make too much of a mess.</p><p>He used to be so angry at his dad for so many things. For cheating on his mom. For marrying his mom in the first place. For being overbearingly worried when Quentin was struggling, but also for stepping back and not being worried or engaged enough. </p><p>For finding out he had cancer and not trying to fix it.</p><p>Finally, he said, “I wish you weren’t dead.”</p><p>He didn’t know where to go from there. It was an expression of everything and nothing that was balled up tight inside of him. </p><p>There was this piece of writing advice that he’d read once which went, like, if you’re trying to write a Thank You card, you have to start by saying literally anything other than thank you, because if you start with that—the whole Goddamn lede, right out of the gate—you’re totally fucked because you’ve left yourself with nowhere else to pivot. Dragging a hand through his hair, Quentin realized his fingers were shaking. He pressed his palm against his sternum and checked for a pulse, but there was none. Curiouser and curiouser. </p><p>He did his best to pivot, anyway.</p><p>“I wish you weren’t dead, and I’m not glad that I made the choice that I did, but I don’t—I don’t think it was the wrong choice? This weight in my chest I’ve been carrying around, feeling guilty—just, sick to my stomach almost, always—I think it’s because I worry that I made you feel like—like it was a choice between your life and mine? And if you do, <em> did, </em> feel that way, I’m sorry and I understand, because I think that maybe that’s actually true.” </p><p>He took another shaky breath; he wondered if he even needed to breathe at all, down here.</p><p>“But dad? Even though that’s all true, I don’t think I would change the fact that I did it.”</p><p>The game was back on the TV. A team did a thing that earned a whistle sound, and Ted groaned at the screen and muttered, “Stupid call.”</p><p>Blinking up at this smooth-faced version of his father, empathy washed over him slowly, a viscous wave that tugged at his limbs as it flowed up and receded again. </p><p>Sometimes he remembered that he was a dad once, in another lifetime that was permanently intertwined like tree roots with this one. He didn’t remember the details, much—he only had little flashes of intelligible memories—but he did come back to Earth with a clear and certain understanding in his bones of what it felt like to love something—someone—you brought into the world so ferociously that it made you stay up at night just to count every inhale and exhale of breath, and to accept it whole: every glare, every tantrum, every cruel word unable to ding the impenetrable iron shield of love around his heart. What it felt like to feel terrorized by your own idiocy and inadequacy as you stumbled through trying to keep another person fed, and safe, and warm, and loved. And how lucky he was to have someone—two someones, for a while, and then just one—to do that with.</p><p>This version of his dad was, like, barely ten years older than Quentin was right now and—how the fuck was Ted supposed to know how to do anything? He was just a person. Some fucking guy from New Jersey with a mentally ill kid who was just trying to make the best choices he could. Nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing, ever; everyone is just trying to do the best they can in the moment. It’s the most anyone can ask of themselves, and anyone else.</p><p>Maybe he wasn’t here to seek forgiveness. Maybe he was here to give it. Maybe nothing mattered and this was all nonsense, all the way down. </p><p>Still, Quentin found the words he needed to say.</p><p>“I’ve spent my whole life feeling like a problem waiting to be fixed. But you never treated me like a problem, or a mistake. And I remember—I remember you telling me, when I got out of the hospital when I was sixteen, ‘Q, we’re going to move forward from this together.’ And at the time I thought you were trying to tell me that you wanted to just forget what happened, like you were embarrassed of me. But that wasn’t it, was it? You were scared and you loved me, and you didn’t want me to feel like I was something broken or like you were constantly monitoring me for cracks.”</p><p>Ted’s eyes glittered with reflected TV light and Quentin wished that, just for a Goddamn merciful second, they would meet his. Just once, one last time.</p><p>“Sometimes fixing things makes them worse, instead of accepting them as they are, but that’s because they weren’t supposed to be fixed in the first place. I think maybe some things really are fixable. And I think I’m starting to get now that, just because a choice hurts, doesn’t mean it was the wrong one. Maybe the whole point of growing up isn’t learning to make the choices that hurt the least, it’s about knowing how to live with them afterward. Which is ironic because I—I might have finally found a way to, you know. Do the thing you spent half my life trying to protect me from.” </p><p>He paused, his throat almost too thick to keep speaking, and Ted roared in celebration at a play, slapping his knee and yelling, “Quick—Quentin, come see this replay!” but Little Quentin didn’t come see this replay. </p><p>Quentin pressed on, tucking his hair behind his ears. </p><p>“I think maybe that one really was a mistake, but. I also think I might be able to fix it.”</p><p>He took a deep breath and stood up, filling his lungs with the dried rose scent of his mom’s potpourri that he knew would hang in his nostrils like campfire smoke, or funeral incense, well after he’d left this place. </p><p>In the kitchen, Quentin could hear her pouring herself a glass of water. He closed his eyes and willed her not to enter the room.</p><p>“This isn’t me trying to square things. Make things right with you. I know I can’t,” he said finally. “I think I just wanted to say goodbye.” </p><p>Quentin leaned forward to kiss his dad on the forehead. Concentrating hard, with his eyes screwed up tight like he was making a wish over his birthday candles as a little kid, he was pretty sure that he could feel the tickle of his dad’s hair under his nose. Ted laughed at something on the television, and reached down to pull the lever on the La-Z-Boy so that the footrest popped up, passing straight through Quentin’s ankles. </p><p>“I love you, dad. I’ll see you soon—but hopefully not for a while.”</p><p>It felt like the right thing to say. It felt like the truth. </p><p>Resolving to never come back to Montclair again, Quentin stepped back and closed his eyes and his brain flipped to another memory, as easily as changing a channel. </p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“Nope, nope, nope.” Eliot nearly tripped on the stairs three times on the way up, his focus pulled away from keeping his legs and cane working in tandem and instead dedicated to making sure his hand couldn’t break free before he made it to the relative safety of his room. </p><p>“El? Buddy! You wanna—wanna stay down here where we can be, you know, all open-doors, sunlight is the best disinfectant, et cetera?”</p><p>“No thank you!” he shouted, for Josh’s benefit this time, hitting the top of the stairs and turning the corner hard to beeline toward the attic. </p><p>His grip on the hand—his hand—was loosening and he needed to be in the nearest approximation of a padded room before that happened, figuratively and literally. </p><p>Keeping hold of it was starting to cause a migraine-like halo of strain around his vision, like he was doing a mental wall-sit; he could feel his grasp growing weaker and wobblier, the way your grip goes weak when you laugh too hard. </p><p>He got to the top of the stairs and kicked the door closed behind him then, in a leap of faith—he let go.</p><p>“What are you?” </p><p>The hand was still holding its pen but looser, now, like it was trying to figure out its next move; Eliot braced himself for a quick jab to the jugular, but even now that it was no longer restrained by his telekinesis, it didn’t so much as twitch. </p><p>“What the <em> fuck </em> are you. Are you that thing? You might as well tell me now, because I’ve got a whole army of very smart and very sober people behind me and—and we’ve already banished you once.”</p><p>The fingers shifted a little, thumb rubbing absently against the pen.</p><p>“Fine, you want to write? Let’s go, Shakespeare.” </p><p>He threw himself into the desk chair and yanked open the front drawer—he wasn’t confident that it actually contained anything to actually write on, but as luck would have it, it had a pad of paper from the Ace Hotel. The phone number of some guy he didn’t remember and almost certainly never called back was scrawled across it.</p><p>Eliot ripped off the top page and squeezed it into a ball with one hand, tossing it to the ground, then waited. “Go for it, fucking—fucking <em> write</em>, Goddamnit. Do you need help to get started?”</p><p>It didn’t respond, and with a roar of frustration he telekinetically slammed the hand into place onto the pad, hard enough to rattle the desk and make it creak against the floorboards. </p><p>“Hey, El? Can you hear me?” Josh knocked gently. His voice had a patronizing uptick at the end. “Everything okay in there, buddy?”</p><p>Eliot ignored him. </p><p>“Fucking do it.”</p><p>A long moment passed. Eliot could hear Josh shifting on the floorboards on the steps outside his room, and Josh’s phone buzzing with a flurry of texts which were probably from Margo and which were also probably written in a tone that more-than-implied that Josh’s testicles were on the menu for dinner tonight.</p><p>“Do it—”</p><p>The hand started to move. It would probably be overly anthropomorphizing to say that it moved regretfully, the way humans assign moods and personalities to, like, fucking car bumpers because the headlights look like eyes, but—it seemed weirdly bummed out, taking up the pen with a slunking sort of gesture and poising the nib over the paper with another moment’s hesitation. </p><p>It started to write something slow and spindly-looking. Eliot couldn’t bear to watch. </p><p>He sat back in the chair and stared at the ceiling, listening to Josh’s one-sided phone conversation outside—“I swear to God babe, I’ve got this, don’t worry. Uh huh. No, I know. No, it’s <em> fine</em>, he’s just—the door’s locked, but he’s definitely on the other side. Because I can hear him talking. How am I supposed to know?” He paused. “You want me to what? That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think? No, I’m not calling you dramatic.”</p><p>The hand was taking forever. Darkly, Eliot wondered if the Monster was drawing a giant dick picture as a <em> fuck you. </em> He closed his eyes and, with his good hand, pressed his thumb into his wound to distract himself from trying to interpret the little shifts and jerks of his left arm, as if they were Morse code.</p><p>“No, he’s not talking anymore. Fuck, Margo, it’s fine, I’ll just—” A mumble of hushed tones, then Josh groaning. “Seriously? Are you sure?”</p><p>After a while, it no longer felt like Eliot’s arm was being dragged around the page on a leash. He took a deep breath. And then another, and then another. It took a while for them to go from hyperventilating, to something that actually flooded his panicked brain and body with much-needed oxygen so that he no longer felt like he’d just taken way too many hits of whippets.</p><p>Once his pulse retreated from the precipice of probably needing medical attention<em>, </em>Eliot opened his eyes and looked. </p><p>The hand was sitting limp next to the writing pad, the pen abandoned next to it and partially obscuring a jumble of shaky letters—the Monster had the handwriting of a daddy long legs on PCP. </p><p>Eliot held his breath and brushed the pen out of the way.</p><p> </p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>I    A M</p>
  <p>SO SRRY EL</p>
  <p>WILL FIX THIS</p>
  <p>AL  I V E IN UNDRWRLD</p>
  <p>T R C W</p>
  <p>- Q</p>
</blockquote><p> </p><p>“Oh, <em> fuck you.” </em> </p><p>The words tore themselves out of Eliot’s throat. </p><p>Rather than embedding the pen in his windpipe, clearly the Monster opted for his jugular in the metaphorical sense—Quentin was dead, and the Monster was not, and this cruel little prank was its <em> We Are the Champions </em> refrain. Motherfucker, that fucking—motherfucker. </p><p>Taking a thousand-mile view of the situation, the pretending-to-be-Quentin stuff made sense, sort of, because it was German-engineering levels of efficient if the Monster wanted to torture him. But knowing that it was a trick didn’t make it hurt less. And—TRCW? Eliot mouthed the letters to himself, wiping angry tears from the corners of his eyes. </p><p>He wished he wasn’t crying. He wished he could keep himself from giving the Monster the satisfaction. He wished he knew what the miserable fuck TRCW meant. </p><p>“What the fuck does that mean, huh? Some good old fashioned ultra-cruelty? Fuck you,” he growled again. </p><p>Maybe it was superfluous to speak the words out loud and the Monster could read his thoughts in addition to steering his body. He didn’t care. He didn’t have the energy left to care. </p><p>“Are you going to torture me until I go fully fucking batshit and you can take over again? Is that the plan? Hey, <em> you—</em>” </p><p>He took hold of his limp hand and slammed it down on the pad again, hard enough that he might have cried out in pain if he could feel anything from his elbow down. </p><p>“If you’re going to get cryptic, that’s a pretty fucking weak way to get inside my head. Are you trying to get revenge for my own little escape act?”</p><p>He snatched up the pen and shoved it between the hand’s limp fingers but it refused to grip it, letting the pen drop back down and roll across the table with a hollow rattle. Eliot let out another howl of frustration and slammed his good fist on the table. The pen crunched under his palm, a little shard of plastic breaking off and embedding itself in his skin. He lifted his hand to suck on the gash, leaving a bloody smear across the top of the message. </p><p>Outside the door, Josh’s voice grew higher-pitched by the second. </p><p>“He’s talking again, so—yeah, okay, sort of yelling. That banging sound was probably—I don’t—okay, okay! Fine! Hey Eliot? El, buddy?”</p><p>TRCW. What the high holy fuck was that supposed to mean? Maybe it was an acronym. He didn’t take the Monster for a riddles and tricks kind of torture artist; more of a to-the-point, neck-breaking kind. But fine. Eliot could play. Chewing on his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood, he held his breath and tried to Bilbo Baggins the code. </p><p>What would the Monster say if it was trying to make this hurt more? What could it say that would make him think Quentin was alive? Why did it even matter? </p><p>And then smaller thought, full of off-limits hope and shoved so far into the corner of Eliot’s mind, along with every other dusty, hoarded thought about Quentin that he tried to ignore but which were starting to clutter up every inch of empty space—making the floorboards of his mind sag and dip under their fucking weight because he couldn’t let go of any of them—<em>And if this really is Quentin, what could he possibly say to make me know it was only him? Do we share enough secrets? Could I figure it out? Please, God, let me figure it out. </em></p><p>“TRCW. Tee arr cee double-you.” </p><p>He tried changing up the rhythm, stressing the letters differently, hoping to spark recognition in his stupid, stupid brain. </p><p>“TRCW. TRCW. Ten red crushed watermelons. Tall rollercoasters curve weightily. Totally really crazy Waugh. Telling rude cunts what’s up—ok, too many words.” </p><p><em> Totally rotten crappy Waugh, </em> he thought. That sounded right. That sounded true. </p><p>Terrible rancid contemptible Waugh. </p><p>Or, trying to resurrect Coldwater, Waugh. That one was true, too.</p><p>Or—oh, <em> oh. </em> No. </p><p>Eliot drew a shaky breath and closed his eyes, pressing the heels of his hands into the sockets. </p><p><em> That’s not </em> —he shook his head, refusing to believe it, because it wasn’t fucking possible. <em> It wasn’t possible. </em> He was letting himself hope again, for things that he wasn’t allowed to hope for. And even if it was <em> that, </em> maybe he had said this secret thing out loud, or only thought it, and the Monster had Turing-ed the code and was now using it to tear down the last of his psychological defences. </p><p>But—no, he knew it was a secret, kept quiet and never actually spoken aloud between them since they came back to this version of the world.</p><p>TRCW. </p><p>Theodore Rupert Coldwater Waugh.</p><p>“Quentin?” </p><p>His name left Eliot’s lips like a plea, like a reflex, an exhalation forced from his lungs as, all at the same time, Josh kicked the door in with a yell and an impressive clatter of wood splinters and dust—and <em> feeling </em> flooded back through his numbed left hand, right into his fingertips—and Eliot began to laugh, so rib-achingly hard and so desperately, that he wasn’t sure it was functionally distinguishable from crying at all.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>
  <strong>INTERLUDE: <em>Not —</em> Big Thief</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> It’s not the energy reeling </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor the lines in your face </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor the clouds on the ceiling </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Not the clouds in space </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> It’s not the phone on the table </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor the bed in the earth </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor the bed in the stable </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor your stable words </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> It’s not the formless being </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor the cry in the air </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor the boy that I’m seeing </em>
</p><p>
  <em> With her long black hair </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> It’s not the open weaving </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor the furnace glow </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nor the blood of you bleeding </em>
</p><p>
  <em> As you try to let go </em>
</p><p> </p><p>[<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIcVwH47uxQ">X</a>]</p><p><br/>
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  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A collection of things:</p><p>- The 4H thing is a real thing. Yes, actually. Also, horses and goats are wildly compatible—look up the origins of the phrase “got your goat”!</p><p>- If this were an episode of the TV show I almost certainly would try to go whole hog on the tongue-in-cheek The Royal Tenenbaums reference and have “Needle in the Hay” play while Eliot shaves but, it’s not, so you’ll just have to have that planted in your head here.</p><p>- Next chapter will be lighter than this miserable, lead-heavy block of misery, I promise. We’re getting the gang back together, and we’re having some fun.</p><p>Content Warnings:</p><p>Eliot’s father’s abuse and homophobia are mentioned, but no slurs are used and there is no physical violence although there is mental abuse. Should you wish to skip past it, stop reading at, “Eliot was never great with death.” and pick back up at, “Margo knew that story, because of secrets magic and the Trials.”</p><p>There is a brief, minimally-detailed and canon-typical—but nonetheless brutal—instance of violence against an animal. Should you wish to skip past it, stop reading at, “In retrospect, staying mostly-ignored would have been a blessing.” and pick back up at, “He never quite worked out whether it was his punishment…”</p><p>This chapter also contains brief moments of Quentin considering previous instances of suicidal ideation in medium detail. Should you wish to skip over them: (1) Stop reading at, “Quentin’s voice sounded strange to his own ears, like he was submerged in the old claw-foot bathtub in the apartment that he and Julia used to share.” and pick back up at “That period of his life felt like a lifetime ago.” and (2) Stop reading at, “Picking magic was a decision made resolutely and with as much strength of will as Quentin had ever mustered in his life. He had to pick magic.” and pick back up at, “It was the only choice. He fucking knew that.”</p>
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